Priest of the Archdiocese of Washington

Fr. Avelino’s Reading List

There are many times when parishioners ask me, “What are you reading these days.” I thought I would include a reading list with the books that I am currently reading. Perhaps you may find them interesting as well. I am always open to getting good leads, so if you find a book that you have found powerfully illuminating with regards to the faith, politics, or culture, please let me know.

“The real conflict today is between Christianity on the one hand and a thoroughly anti-Christian concept of life in the other. This struggle has reached a decisive stage and has become a radical clash between two worlds, embracing all domains of life ad human existence. The liberal age was an age of compromise. Notwithstanding its anticlericalism and its contention against Christian doctrine in the religious and philosophical fields, it retained Christian elements in the moral, sociological, juridical, and cultural spheres. Our present age, however, reveals a consistent, anti-Christian concept in every domain of life on the part of the enemies of Christianity.”

“My attitude toward the world should be fundamentally the same as toward my own sins, toward the disordered and sinful roots in myself: keen awareness and aversion! From this attitude alone springs the desire for conversion. Which, in turn, over time, forges in us the faculty that is so solidly Christian: the capacity to judge. The “yes, yes…no, no” that Jesus teaches us implies a spiritual maturity that rescues us from the superficiality of the foolish heart.”

“Not only the homily has to be nourished by the Word of God. All evangelization is based on that word, listened to, mediated upon, lived, celebrated and witnessed to. The Sacred Scriptures are the very source of evangelization. Consequently, we need to be constantly trained in hearing the word. The Church does not evangelize unless she constantly lets herself be evangelized. It is indispensable that the word of God “be ever more fully at the heart of every ecclesial activity.”

Dante, in the Divine Comedy, after professing his faith to Saint Peter, describes that light as a “spark, which then becomes a burning flame and like a heavenly star within me glimmers.” It is this light of faith that I would now like to consider, so that it can grow and enlighten the present, becoming a star to brighten the horizon of our journey at a time when mankind is particularly in need of light.

A critical act takes place on two planes simultaneously, standing back and examining at every moment that which it is in the process of carrying out, and always knowing precisely what are the implications of that which it asserts, accomplished or plans.

Saint Augustine CITY OF GOD, An abridged Version from the Translation by Gerald G. Wash, S.J.; Demetrius B. Zema, S.J., Grace Monahan, O.S.U.; and Daniel J. Honan; edited with an introduction by Vernon J. Bourke; Foreword by Etienne Gilson (1958)

Doubtless, it could happen that a Christian, well versed in ecclesiastical literature, might not be familiar with the name of Platonists nor even know that among Greek-speaking people two distinct schools of philosophy have flourished: the Ionian and the Italian. Nevertheless, he is not so naïve as not to know that philosophers look upon themselves as the lovers, if not the possessors, of wisdom; and he is on guard against materialistic philosophers, who give no thought to the Creator of the world.

When the purest and most profound religious traditions are set aside, man is separating himself from his truth; he is living contrary to that truth, and he loses his freedom. Nor can philosophical ethics be simply autonomous. It cannot dispense with the concept of God or dispense with the concept of a truth of being that is of an ethical nature. If there is no truth about man; then he has no freedom. Only the truth makes us free.